It's one of the most amazing achievements of American style capitalism to turn fraud into an industry.

Crypto

Fraud

Name a more iconic duo

Repulican

Pedophile

Maybe?

They‘re practically synonymous.

There are only two good use cases for crypto:

1. Financial speculation
2. Criminal activity and fraud

I wonder what the going rate is for a pardon? How much $TRUMP does it take?

Donnie Dump

Cerebrumpling

I've always maintained that the dude who spent like 10,000 Bitcoin to buy a pizza was the first and last legitimate use of crypto.

the venn diagram of crypto nerd assholes and tiny dicks is a circle.

sad thing is that it could be great as an alternative to mastercard/visa but crypto fash have just ruined any attempt to make it appealing to anyone other than crypto fascists.

The main use case for crypto is for peer to peer transactions that do not require the permission of any third party (or government). A secondary use case for crypto is the enablement of self-executing smart contracts.

The problem is that the financial speculation aspect of crypto has eaten everything else. "Number go up" is now the main use case, and people do t actually transact much with crypto anymore. And the only type of smart contract that has gained any popular use whatsoever is the type that makes more shitty crypto tokens. Any general utility it had years ago evaporated when it became too valuable to transact with.

Except for those criminals and fraudsters you mentioned: they do put crypto to good use evading government oversight of their transactions. In this respect, crypto is no different than a briefcase full of cash. Yes, you could legally stash a briefcase full of cash in your house, but there are so many better (trackable) places to keep that cash that if the cops found that briefcase in your house wbile executing a search for other reasons, they would cite the existence of that briefcase as proof of sometnig nefarious.

You don't need crypto as an alternative to MasterCard/Visa. There are multiple national payment systems that de facto work on a public benefit basis or offer no fees or very low fees.

One major example is India's UPI:

Unified Payments Interface - Wikipedia

(en.m.wikipedia.org)

Even in a medium sized developing country like Ukraine, I can send anyone money (P2P, business payment, business transaction) with minimal or no fees on a near instantaneous basis off my phone.

I am not on top of recent payment infrastructure developments, but from memory this is relatively common.

No need for scam services like PayPal, Venmo.

And this has been avaible for half a decade minimum (was living in another country before then).

i'm not saying i'd use it or want it; i just meant it could have been had it not basically been relegated to the fringes by the cryptobros that made it unlikeable.

I've heard such arguments before, I don't find them convincing in the least. I don't believe you've thought this through.

You bring up cash? So what? You can use banks for crime as well. I believe one of the major US companies that got rescued in 2008 had several billion USD on the books that no one came to pick up because of disclosure rules.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg, there are multiple massive red flags with your arguement that don't require specialist education/experience/knowledge.

That's fair. I do agree it has some properties to potentially be used in payment infrastructure systems.

I would argue something like India UPI (we don't have a name for it in Ukraine) is better in every possible respect than a payment infrastructure based on blockchain tech.